Guess the Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

Guess the Programming Language

tutorialzine.com

22 pointsmartinaglv18 comments

I was expecting this to be a lot less straightforward. It would be interesting to see if you could trick people by writing code in such a way that it looks like it is a different language.

"In computing, a polyglot is a computer program or script written in a valid form of multiple programming languages, which performs the same operations or output independent of the programming language used to compile or interpret it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)

That might make it even trickier if the answer isn't a set of radio buttons, but checkboxes instead.

Oh, I like the checkboxes idea. That could get really interesting.

I think this was too easy. Maybe it should group more similar languages together or something.

The choices offered gave away too much, I was able to pick out languages I've never spent any time looking at, much less coding, from the choices offered. Make me choose from the whole list of 20 or more instead of 3 or 4 each time and I'd get less than half instead of 20/20.

Maybe I'm more aware than I give myself credit for, though.

I did the same. "Well it's not C++ and not JS so it must be [language I've never paid attention before]" and yes it was.

The php one had a <?php tag at the top of it. Just saying.

That's almost a language requirement. You could use short tags, and begin the file with "<?" :)

If you've done (heck, even seen) a hello world in half of these languages, you can get the rest via elimination.

A harder quiz: http://helloworldquiz.com/

I like this one much better. There are many more options, and the choices are much more closely related.

Agree with you. HelloWordQuiz is more fun and challenges

I loved the one that somehow looked like BF* but was actually JS ;)

Confusion could arise when doing python in ruby or having some subtle distinction between c and c++, but I guess the test is not made to trick people or diagnose actual language knowledge. Still, lots of fun!

The alert call is what makes that one easy.

I haven't written a line in half of these languages, and I got a perfect score.

I still don't know what this says about the uniqueness of programming languages or the ratio of code reading to code writing in the industry.

Am I shallow that it made me feel good getting all the answers right even though I knew most of the people who tried it would?

somewhere there's a much harder version, it has code that could be c/c++, c#/java, scheme/CL, except for one little distinguishing feature.

seemingly way too easy.

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